A long time ago, long before the first line of the current Not Gods But Monsters was penned, the project was known as Fantasma. While there were a lot of similar elements and themes shared between the two tales, there is a number of items that never made the final cut into the final release. As with the current books, I did artwork for the original tale, including a number of character illustrations.

As with the earlier entries in the series, I worked up a series of character sketches on prominent characters in The Killing Kind. Much like A Prison of Flesh, this series is a set of four, with a limited color palette. Just like the blue used for APOF, this set features green as a major identifying color. Below are the first two in the series.

For those familiar with earlier books in the Realm of Tah’afajien series, the cover for Book 3 falls in line, layout-wise, with Book 2, where the image is features a major character and a prominent location in the story. This time around, the focus fell on Marianus O’mas and the Moa’rehnzan capital city of Gran’rehnza.

Part the second, which goes after part the first. If you haven't read the first part, go here to get an idea of the steps taken to reach this point. At this stage, with the sky box and distant background elements close to completion, all work shifted to adding details to the foreground structures.

Before each book can be prepared for print, a cover illustration must be created. A lot of the time, this happens well in advance of a tangible release date. While the illustrative work for some of my other books has been largely character-focused, for this project I wanted to try something a little different.

For those of you following my Instagram account, you probably know I recently purchased Wacom Intuos tablet/pen in an attempt to work on more digital pieces. As someone whose spent multiple decades as an exclusively-physical media person, this took time, like relearning how to walk. In that time, I've pulled together a handful of various character and creature sketches.

Unlike my previous books, where there was sizable effort to produce support artwork as part of the world-building process, the development of The Fifth Era of Man took on a more minimalist approach. While there are no character illustrations, a small batch of sketches were created for some of the armor and weaponry found in the story.

One of the major elements of The Fifth Era of Man is the usage of semanifestures by the Progenitors known as Prae and Erudatta. This special ability, while having all the appearance of magic, is rooted in the experience of a highly-advanced scientific society.